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This CA University Is One of the Highest In Black Student Success Rates

The Los Angeles Times ran a story on Thursday (March 2nd), which reported some great news about one of California’s best Division One universities.

This online news article was written by Teresa Wantanbe, an education correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Wantanbe’s piece was titled UC Riverside Ranks Among Nation’s Best in Promoting African American Student Success, Study Finds.

The new study that The Times article was based on got conducted by a Washington D.C.-based education policy organization called The Education Trust. This study was titled A Look at Black Student Success:Identifying Top- and Bottom-Performing Institutions.

The Education Trust’s study was authored by Dr. Andrew H. Nichols and Denzel Evans-Bell. Dr. Nichols is a director of higher education research and data analytics at The Education Trust. Mr. Evans-Bell is a higher education research expert. A portion of the text from The Education Trust study reads as follows:

“In the fall of 2008, over 160,000 Black students began their quest for a bachelor’s degree by enrolling as full-timefreshmen in a four-year college or university. This represents some progress: Those numbers are up 37 percent overthe past decade, compared with 28 percent growth for all undergraduates.” (EdTrust.org)

However, at the University of California Riverside (UCR), black students don’t just enroll at a higher rate than they do at many of the nation’s universities. They graduate from UCR at higher rates as well. Wantanbe wrote the following in her report about the great findings in the Education Trust study:

“According to the study, African Americans made up 8% of [UCR’s] first-time, full-time freshmen and had a six-year graduation rate of 69.5% under a weighted average of data from 2012 to 2014. Only Florida State University’s 74.5% graduation rate was higher.” (The Los Angeles Times)

To read the full report for The Education Trust study, click the link to the second source listed below.